Twenty-eight years ago today, the Challenger space shuttle broke up barely a minute into its flight, killing all seven astronauts on board.

"NASA's almost unbroken string of success over the past quarter-century lulled many into a false complacency. The tragic explosion of the Shuttle Challenger earlier this year is a grim reminder that the leap to space is a complex and difficult one. But the steady progress of man toward the stars promises to continue for many years to come."

Isaac Asimov wrote those words, and Popular Mechanics published them in our July 1986 issue, a special edition in which PM called upon erudite writers to reflect on American technology an ingenuity. Although the famed sci-fi author was writing just months after the space shuttle disaster of January 28, 1986—28 years ago today—this mention of the Challenger is just a brief side note in Asimov's wide-ranging look back at the American space program. (Read the essay in its entirety here.) Nevertheless, Asimov's mention is an insight into what space enthusiasts were thinking in 1986, as NASA investigated the Challenger disaster and struggled to figure out what it meant for the future of manned spaceflight.

It's not as though NASA had an unblemished record before Challenger. In fact, yesterday was the anniversary of the 1967 Apollo 1 fire that killed all three crew members. But the two decades following that accident were marked mostly by NASA's staggering successes—landing on the moon and then making five return trips, building the Skylab space station, building the reusable space shuttle and making manned space travel seem routine. Spaceflight isn't routine. But as Asimov points out, that string of successes made it even harder for Americans to swallow the loss of seven astronauts aboard Challenger.

Asimov's last sentence was a nod to the uncertainty of the time. The Challenger disaster led to a space shuttle hiatus of nearly three years, grinding travel to orbit to a halt. In the middle of that shuttle gap, in March 1987, PM published a reaction to the crisis: "How to Get American Back Into Space" by Walter M. Schirra, one of the original seven Mercury astronauts. While he didn't get everything right, Schirra anticipated the continually inhabited space station we have today. But more important than the predictions is the attitude of an astronaut: "The fabulous challenge that has lured us since the 1960s is too strong to keep us down."

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NASA did recover—to an extent. The shuttles resumed flying in late 1988 and kept flying until their 2011 retirement, even with the 2003 Columbia disaster. But many of the questions of the mid-80s still nip at today's space industry. As our Editor-in-Chief Jim Meigs wrote in his obit for the shuttle program, the shuttles kept flying for so long after Challenger in part because the Congressional representatives of launch-industry states wanted to keep thousands of jobs from disappearing. NASA still has to navigate the same kind of politics as its tries to figure out its mission in this new era, in which the shuttles are collecting dust in museums and private companies still working to take their place in ferrying astronauts into orbit.

But the big question is about risk. When it lost seven astronauts in 1986, NASA put the shuttle program on what Meigs called "permanent go-slow status." While the agency rightfully tried to correct the technical and organizational problems that led to the disaster, it also got conservative.

Today, besides the companies like SpaceX and Sierra Nevada that want to carry NASA astronauts into space, there are upstart efforts such as Mars One and Inspiration Mars that would carry volunteers to the Red Planet—and in the case of Mars One, never to return. As PM contributor Rand Simberg argued in his recent book, the big, important space missions of the future are high-risk, and the risk aversion that grew after the Challenger disaster can't hold us back from doing great things in space.

When Asimov wrote for PopMech, the Challenger disaster was just one event in the story of American achievement in space—not something he imagined would halt "the steady progress of man toward the stars." We hope he's correct.

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